The Common Culture, R.I.P.
TEACHOUT, TERRY
The Common Culture, R.I.P. Goodnight to David and Much More By Terry Teachout Idon't watch much TV news anymore, but when I heard David Brinkley was retiring, I made a point of tuning in to ABC's...
...Skelton got a half-page obit in the New York Times, not bad for a comedian whose name is completely unknown to anyone under the age of, oh, 35...
...lawyers did a star turn, and Roy Romer played his why-we-need-cam-paign-finance-reform soundbite two or three times—I lost count—before Sam Donaldson finally gave him the hook...
...Leavis...
...For them, diversity equals individualism, and the Internet is the ultimate symbol of individualism, a place where all can have their simultaneous say, be they lacto-vegetarians or neo-Nazis...
...They can't even keep up with it, because it doesn't exist anymore, not the way it did when I was a boy...
...As a result, I find it virtually impossible to convey to my younger friends any sense of what it was like when everybody watched the same TV shows and read the same magazines...
...When Norman Podhoretz went to Cambridge in the early '50s, he found that the young Americans he met there had more in common than "good teeth and smooth complexions...
...Now they are gone, and I miss them, the same way I miss the slow-moving America of my small-town youth, back when the word "everybody" was more than an abstraction...
...He is at work on a biography of H.L...
...the Book-of-the-Month Club chose The Last Puritan and Nineteen Eighty-four as Main Selections...
...Red Skelton and Carol Burnett, Jack Paar and Johnny Carson, What's My Line...
...I know a half-dozen Gen-Xers better than casually, and when I'm with them, I do most of the listening, pretending to keep up with what postmodernism has wrought...
...I don't know what the cover of that issue was, but I like to think Norman Rockwell painted it...
...Somehow I doubt it...
...Arturo Toscani-ni conducted on NBC for 17 years...
...If you want to know what America was like in 1962, there's your answer: It was a place where everybody watched Ed Sullivan and knew who David Brink-ley was...
...In those days before pop became fashionable we shared in a thousand guilty secret loves: the Shadow and the Green Hornet, Batman and Superman, James Cagney and Pat O'Brien, Harry James and Glenn Miller, "Did You Ever See a Dream Walking...
...Needless to say, it's decidedly unfashionable to complain about this state of affairs...
...It was because CBS broadcast both Gilli-gan's Island and Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts that some people discovered the latter, and profited thereby...
...And then, purifying ourselves in orgies of authenticity after days, weeks, months of genuflection in cathedrals and galleries and museums and chateaux, we would vie with one another in expertise in the culture that was really in our bones, dredging up the lyrics of long-forgotten popular songs, advertising slogans, and movie plots . . . Isn't it funny...
...Still, I know better than to pretend that once upon a time, TV was nothing but Peter Pan, Playhouse 90, and The Bell Telephone Hour...
...I wonder, too, what future encounters with their multicultural pasts will cause my brightly ironic Gen-X friends to suddenly start thinking of themselves as Americans...
...I never thought of myself as an American before...
...But I know I'm just going through the motions...
...more often than not, the six-screen theater on the corner of my Upper West Side block is showing at least four movies whose names I don't know, most of them intended for a niche market which in the polite parlance of the day could be described as Male Adolescents of Color...
...Back then, my family watched The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, and so did every other family I knew, except for the ones that preferred NBC's Huntley-Brinkley Report...
...The point of network television in its heyday wasn't that it served up masterpieces around the clock...
...rather, it was that anybody could partake at will of the wideranging fare it did serve up...
...Even Clement Greenberg, that unrivaled scourge of middlebrowism, wrote about abstract art for the Saturday Evening Post's "Adventures of the Mind" series...
...It was business as usual for the first 45 minutes or so: One of Marv Albert's Terry Teachout, the music critic of Commentary, writes the "Front Row Center" column for Civilization...
...Red Skelton had died the previous week, and Charles Kuralt went on the road for good a couple of months before that...
...Besides, you can't keep up with the culture by talking to a half-dozen Gen-Xers...
...Then there was a reel of good-night-Chet-goodnight-David clips, after which Brinkley, looking all of his 77 years but sounding far younger, took his last, elegant bow...
...You too...
...Sir John Reith, the first director-general of the BBC, once said his policy was to give the public "something rather better than it thinks it wants...
...Woody Allen's Radio Days, which shows how network radio helped weave second-generation immigrant families of the '40s into the fabric of middle-class America, reminds us that TV served only to accelerate a process that was already moving at a brisk clip by the time Norman Podhoretz went off to Cambridge to study with F.R...
...For all our latter-day worship of "inclusive-ness," I'm struck by just how inclusive middlebrow culture really was, as well as how much it demanded of its consumers...
...God knows TV news in the '50s and '60s had its problems, but at least it tried to be serious, so much so that stylish, thoughtful writers like David Brinkley and Charles Kuralt could actually become on-camera stars...
...we would say to one another on a chance encounter in Paris or Athens or Rome, isn't it funny...
...and I've Got a Secret: All are gone and few remembered, and none has been replaced...
...They can't make the imaginative leap, and most don't particularly want to...
...and "I Left My Heart at the Stage Door Canteen...
...Will they remember Seinfeld the way I remember David Brinkley...
...It's foolish to romanticize middlebrow culture, but no less foolish to claim it was nothing more than an opiate of the masses...
...similarly, the gatekeepers of middlebrow culture in America felt a genuine responsibility occasionally to give the public something rather better than Gilligan's Island...
...Mencken...
...Then it was all over, and I felt empty and disoriented, the way most babyboomers feel when another relic of their lost youth passes from the scene...
...Goodnight to David and Much More By Terry Teachout Idon't watch much TV news anymore, but when I heard David Brinkley was retiring, I made a point of tuning in to ABC's This Week to see him say goodbye...
...Instead, I surf the Web in search of tiny firms that sell flickering kinescopes of old game shows, and note with sadness the passing of the long-forgotten giants of the small screen...
...Watching Ed Sullivan on Sunday nights, you saw a little bit of everything—Ella Fitzgerald, Jackie Mason, Edward Villella— and so did your neighbors...
...Not that it mattered much, since there were only three TV networks to choose from, movie theaters showed only one film at a time, and Billboard had only one chart that mattered, the Hot 100, at the top of which you could find both the Beatles and, occasionally, Dave Brubeck, the same way you could see them both on The Ed Sullivan Show...
...Intelligent people who call themselves conservatives tell me this is progress, and I might believe them if I believed in progress...
...If I want to see a movie better suited to the interests of a Colorless, Middle-aged Male, I have to go somewhere else...
...Conservative intellectuals who decry the death of the common culture in America usually have in mind the King James Bible, Shakespeare, and the Gettysburg Address, but more than that has died in the quarter-century since I graduated from high school: We have also lost the shared reference points of our popular culture...
...we would say delightedly to one another, after listening to initially sheepish confessions about the incorrigibility of our low American tastes, you too...
...Time published Whittaker Chambers on Reinhold Niebuhr and Rebecca West...
...I wonder how many people read it...
...I get 76 channels on my cable TV, including three different all-news networks...
...Such shows were an important part of the cultural glue that helped hold this country together...
...TV has become yet another instrument of social fragmentation, an anteroom to the World Wide Web in which we sit in separate cubicles, sovereign monads reigning over gated communities of the mind...
...But it was the movies, the phonograph, and radio that created a full-scale opening for mass-produced middlebrow "art" intended for an audience whose members were literate to widely varying degrees, and these media soon became, for better or worse, the most powerful integrating forces in American life since the rise of the common school...
...Billboard now publishes a dozen different charts, including Top Singles, Top Albums, Country, Adult Contemporary, R&B, Modern Rock, Latin, Hot Dance Music/Maxi-Sin-gles, Jazz, and Classical...
...To be sure, pop culture didn't start with Harry James and The Green Hornet: It dates back to the invention in the mid-19th century of the modern printing presses that first made possible the production of cheap, large-circulation daily newspapers aimed not at the well-to-do but the newly literate working classes...
...America was a different country then, and never more so than when you went someplace else...
...Not only is diversity the cultural trump card of the '90s, but a surprising number of conservatives seem perfectly happy to be living in a land of niche markets...
Vol. 3 • October 1997 • No. 5
